1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of controlling operations of computing devices for a group of users in a networked system.
2. Background Description
This present invention addresses problems encountered in setting privacy policies for users of network enabled computing systems where system policies can vary over time and where policies may vary from system to system.
There is an increasing number of digital computing devices capable of interacting with networked systems, including mobile personal computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), “smart” cell phones, and other personal electronic devices. These digital devices all have various configuration settings to control how each device will operate.
Access and security configurations for network enabled digital computing devices are highly dependent upon context. The operation of a device may vary as a user travels to different locations, or the requirements may vary over time in the same location. A user working within his or her own corporate firewall, for example, may configure applications to enable others inside the firewall to access confidential documents without encryption; however, the same confidential documents would have to be encrypted if accessible from outside the firewall. To take another example, a PDA user would not normally permit access to the PDA from a public network; however, a user traveling to an airport or other location where public information is available from a network may find it convenient to allow limited access to enable the PDA to receive announcements such as flight schedule changes.
In the current state-of-the-art process for configuring operations of computing devices, a device may store a number of static configuration profiles. For example, a cell phone may have separate configuration profiles for office, car, and home. However, the limited number of profiles available according to the current art may not accurately reflect the environments in which users find themselves. In addition, configuration profiles available according to the current art are “open loop” in the sense that a configuration profile, once it has been set, does not change unless the user explicitly provides input and changes the profile.
Interacting with networks using personal digital computing devices may therefore be cumbersome and inconvenient because of the need manually to reset or adjust configuration settings every time a location change creates a change in a network environment, or a change from one network environment to another. It may also be cumbersome and inconvenient to be required manually to keep track of how a network environment changes over time, or when a change has been made from one network environment to another. These factors discourage the use of portable computing devices to interact with networks in situations where context would require changing configuration settings.